Generation Now is up and coming your way

By Cedar Attanasio

Updated
4:02 pm EDT, Thursday, July 20, 2017

Volunteer canvassers Nicole Cassidy, left, and Jasmine Bramwell of Bridgeport Generation Now go house to house along Pequonnock Street in Bridgeport, Conn., on Saturday July 8, 2017. Bridgeport Generation Now is canvassing with other progressive organizing groups as part of a voter engagement campaign called BPT Votes! less

Volunteer canvassers Nicole Cassidy, left, and Jasmine Bramwell of Bridgeport Generation Now go house to house along Pequonnock Street in Bridgeport, Conn., on Saturday July 8, 2017. Bridgeport Generation Now ... more

Volunteer canvassers Nicole Cassidy, left, and Jasmine Bramwell of Bridgeport Generation Now go house to house along Pequonnock Street in Bridgeport, Conn., on Saturday July 8, 2017. Bridgeport Generation Now is canvassing with other progressive organizing groups as part of a voter engagement campaign called BPT Votes! less

Volunteer canvassers Nicole Cassidy, left, and Jasmine Bramwell of Bridgeport Generation Now go house to house along Pequonnock Street in Bridgeport, Conn., on Saturday July 8, 2017. Bridgeport Generation Now ... more

Bridgeport residents might get a visit this summer from volunteer Jasmine Bramwell.

The 33-year-old billing specialist spent the first Saturday of July canvassing as a part of BPT Votes!, a civic awareness project led by the nascent political organizing group Bridgeport Generation Now.

Most of her knocks on doors went unanswered, but some people talked to her, like the 8-year-old-boy who passed her on the sidewalk.

“He asked us what we were doing,” she said.

She asked the boy what he wanted to change in Bridgeport.

“He said, ‘It would be nice if they could fix the cracks in the road.’ ”

Going door-to-door, she heard concerns from people who don’t often venture to City Council meetings, and some who haven’t voted in years. With the enthusiasm of new members like Bramwell, Bridgeport Generation Now is hoping to lure those people into civic life.

Since BGN got going in May of 2016, it has grown to 141 members, said president Callie Heilmann, 35. And more than half pay dues.

Monthly meetings are well-attended, and a weekly events calender is a reliable chronicle of progressive political action in the city. The calendar also includes cultural and educational events.

“We birthed an organization, we birthed membership,” said Heilmann, a mother of three and a former teacher who lives with her husband in Black Rock.

On June 28, city counselors attended the group’s weekly member meeting to address everything from parking meters to police accountability — an issue where BGN “is still in the educating phase ..., spurred by (Jayson Negron’s) killing,” according to the minutes.

Negron was the 15-year-old boy shot to death on May 9 by a police officer after he and a friend were stopped by police in a stolen car.

The group hasn’t settled on a platform or endorsed candidates, but it is attracting followers who are willing to spend their weekends talking to strangers on their porches. So does the group plan to leverage its growing clout?

Heilmann borrowed the name, spirit and organizational structure of the group from San Bernardino Generation Now, a group of 20-something Californians frustrated with a recent municipal bankruptcy and ongoing gridlock in the city council. “We gave her our blessing,” said Jorge Heredia, 26, a teaching assistant involved with the California group since its founding in 2013.

Heilmann is the group’s leader, but she acts like more of an arbiter than an executive. Before speaking with a reporter, she sent a group text message to ask council members for permission. And she’s not attached to particular policy outcomes from the group.

“I think my background as a teacher plays a role because teaching is all about providing people with the tools ... that they need to do whatever they need to do,” she said.

When Negron was killed, for example, the group held a forum for people to voice grievances, but didn’t lead any protests or legislative campaign.

“(BGN) is almost like a supportive group for people who want to make change,” said Kate Rivera, a member of the group’s 10-person action committee and a Bridgeport parent.

Rivera, 39, works as a social service coordinator and social justice educator — two positions that put her in front of the public and the marginalized.

“There’s a general sense (among Bridgeport residents) that there’s a group of cronies that conspires to rape the citizenry of its resources,” she said.

BGN holds its meetings in B:Hive, a co-working space managed by action council member Maggie Gotterer, 30.

Her core issue outside the group is access to healthy food. As chairwoman of the Bridgeport Food Policy Council, she oversees SNAP and other discounts for low-income consumers at the city’s seven farmers markets.

Another member of the council, Isa Mujahid, 39, focuses on police accountability and other civil rights issues full time. After Negron was killed by a Bridgeport police officer, he juggled his BGN duties with lobbying in Hartford on a policing bill as part of his job at CTCORE-Organize Now!.

He’s one of the few full-time activists affiliated with the group, providing logistics and training for civic engagement.

Another progressive activist, Julio López Varona of Make the Road, trained Bramwell to canvass local homes.

In separate interviews, Heilmann, Rivera and Mujahid stressed BGN’s nonhierarchical structure that dissuaded one issue or concern from determining the group’s actions.

BGN leaders try to balance the desire to be non-partisan with the reality that it attracts mostly progressive activists.

For example, the Working Families Party gave access to it’s voter data to help it decide which houses canvassers like Bramwell should knock on, according to Heilmann.

But because the organization is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, they don’t send any information back (such as if a house on the list is abandoned, or if the occupant has switched political parties).

The machine

One can’t get further from a BGN meeting at B:Hive than the fundraiser at Testo’s Ristorante on June 29 for city mayor and aspiring gubernatorial candidate Joe Ganim.

“You haven’t seen this kind of energy since the end of the 1970s and 1980s,” said politics writer and former Ganim aide Lennie Grimaldi. “The Bridgeport (Democratic) machine has become a jalopy.”

Grimaldi said BGN, along with the Young Democrats, is stirring up the “stagnation” in Bridgeport’s political culture. To illustrate the lack of competition over the past two decades, he cited statistics that the Democratic advantage over Republicans has increased from 2.5-to-1 to 10-to-1.

He also sees political engagement as a result of more young people living downtown.

“A lot of them are artists,” he said.

Take action council member, musician and digital designer John Torres, 33. Though he wanted to live in Black Rock — where Heilmann lives — he found it was too expensive, so he bought a 117-year-old fixer-upper on Wood Terrace.

“I have a pretty significant belief that our system is broken because of a lack of knowledge,” he said at the house in March, surrounded by exposed pipes and ripped-up floorboards.

“Joe Ganim just did a fundraiser, and it’s not even an election year for him,” Torres said. “That’s just starting a war chest.”

Gutting and rebuilding

BGN’s leaders are young and busy with their personal and professional lives — the opposite of some of the senior and retired citizens that tout the highest voter turnout rates.

Gotterer is house hunting. Mujahid answers his phone from his car on a grueling organizing schedule. One of Rivera’s jobs stopped paying her due to the state budget crisis.

In May, Torres was gutting a house, working on BPT Votes! and producing a music album — on top of working full-time to pay for it all.

The 117-year-old wood frame is less than a mile from downtown and his music studio, and a few blocks from the corner store his parents used to own. They now run one in Black Rock, which is out of Torres’ price range.

On the second floor, his father and former city councilman Enrique Torres worked on the pipes and threw debris down to the 30-foot dumpster in the backyard.

Torres the elder ran for mayor on the Republican ticket in 2013. His son designed the campaign materials in the same contemporary style of his music videos. Now the younger Torres’ talents are going toward BGN. He designed the green BPT Votes! logo pasted on the back of Heilmann’s iPhone, and was one of the main organizers of Civics 101, a two-day series of panels and lectures by experts in land use, law and politics.

After father and son finished up the morning work, John Torres left the house renovation for his studio/office to finish some web design work and meet a fellow musician for a recording session.

In the studio, a full-sized taxidermy bear stood next to a keyboard and a bank of computers and sound equipment.

Torres spoke of the group’s other accomplishments and potential for the future.

“I think our politicians really manipulate people’s lack of knowledge,” he said. “What we can do is we can synthesize a lot of groups’ interests and data into more of an umbrella sort of unifying voice of change for Bridgeport.”

Youthful ambition

Bramwell, the canvasser, found out about the group on Facebook. She attended a meeting, and embraced canvassing.

“I’ve lived here my whole life and I’m not going anywhere,” she said, explaining why she chose to join the group. “It’s in my best interest if I get involved.”

For Torres it’s success or bust. For example, while he hopes “the schools improve on their own” in Bridgeport, he could imagine moving to Fairfield if they don’t.

It’s unclear how BGN gets from holding meetings to fixing the criminal justice system or even cracks in the road.

To understand where BGN is headed, it helps to look at the arc of the San Bernardino Generation Now. Heredia and his fellow activists said in California, they have succeed in getting young people to run for office.

They heralded a new city charter that synched more city elections to state and federal ones, a measure Heredia believes will get more people to vote on neighborhood issues.

“If they see it on their ballot, they’ll be more likely to look it up and ask themselves, ‘Do I support this? Am I against it?’ ” he said.

In San Bernardino, they focus less directly on political activities and do park cleanups and art projects.

Precisely because the Generation Now groups are less hierarchical, major changes, like endorsing candidates, may be in its future.

Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect the spelling of BPT Votes!, correct an agenda item in the member meeting, and clarify the origin of the data used for the canvassing, which is the Working Families Party, not the Young Democrats.